Circulation

Use in the book

Rain rises as vapor and returns as rain in an asserted eternal circle that maintains the same quantity of moisture. The musical account describes bodily humors, blood, breath, and movement circulating differently with different affections. Its aspiration to measure respiration does not turn the account into a completed experiment. The rhetorical fragment gives meaning a return from the last word to the first, making periodic style easier for memory to hold. What is conserved, distributed, or returned differs in each case.

Places to read

1. I, p. 172, entry 4, ¶1The water cycle illustrates an asserted constant quantity.
2. I, p. 66–67, entry 3, ¶1Bodily circulation varies with affections in the music argument.
3. II, p. 500, entry 8, ¶1Meaning returns from a period’s last word to its first.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the conditional instrument proposal in the musical account and the opening If fragment in the rhetorical one. It does not substitute a modern circulatory or meteorological theory. Period and periodic in the last passage concern rhetorical construction, not a calendar interval.

Diastole and systole

French: diastole; systole.

The early musical argument places varied diastole and systole among the bodily movements aroused by sound. Much later, a topic fragment speaks of contracting and dilating the brain, then of systoles and diastoles of mind and attention. The English translation keeps the physiological names and their plurals instead of flattening them into general excitement. The later fragment lists proposed topics; it does not report a completed anatomical investigation.

Places to read: I, p. 66–67, entry 3, ¶1; II, p. 884, entry 8, ¶1.